This Coffee Maker Makes Great Coffee, but It’s Way Too Expensive and Complicated

The more I pay for something, the less work I want it to involve.  It’s why I love smart home technology—it enables my laziness and creates efficiency around the tasks that keep a house running. An expensive coffee maker, then, with smart technology added, should be so efficient and easy to use a cat could do it. While the Miele MilkPerfection 6360 makes a perfect cup of coffee, it still required a lot more intervention than I’d have liked for the $2,799 price tag. 

In an ideal world, the moment I get out of bed, a coffee maker somewhere will begin brewing a strong cup of black coffee so that it will be available, without wait, for me to grab when I hit the kitchen. Sadly, I’ve been unable to train any animal I’ve parented to make this happen. The Miele, I had hoped, could do precisely that, using the smart app. In action it proved to be less than accurate, but the smart app isn’t a total loss. 

A beautiful machine

Let’s start with what there is to like. The Miele 6360 is a giant of a coffee maker, with an impressive 10×17″ footprint. That might not seem huge, but it was deeper than my coffee bar. From the outside, it looks simple and well-built, with beautiful rounded edges and clean details. Wherever you put it, it looks amazing. You can load up whole beans or ground beans into two different hoppers. The Miele’s marketing materials talk up the “quality milk container” for the 6360, which I found amusing, but indeed, it is a solidly made glass container with a screw-on lid and metal siphon that you can move between the coffee machine and the refrigerator. You can also use a provided elongated siphon on a carton of milk if you prefer. The siphon attaches to the main hub of the machine via some flexible silicone tubing. 

The main hub of the machine, where most drinks are dispensed, raises and lowers to fit whatever kind of cup you’re using. Atop the machine, a rubberized heating pad keeps your chosen mug or cup warm for you. An off-center spigot dispenses hot water for tea. A tray beneath the machine contains a long trough for overflow, of which there will be a lot, and wasted coffee grounds.  The water reservoir hugs the side of the machine and will hold 60 ounces of water. The face of the machine is dotted with buttons that feature icons rather than labels. 

The Miele produces flawless drinks

The Miele produces exceptionally reliable beverages, from ristretto to caffe lattes with picture-perfect foam, all at the touch of more than one button. To achieve that, Miele allows you to fine-tune almost every aspect of the coffee production behind the scenes. A conical burr grinder made of stainless steel is infinitely tunable, but there are five presets. Milk foam is steamed twice before it hits your cup, to make it frothier. You can pull a cup of joe from whole beans or grounds, although I’m unsure why you’d use the grounds. You can access water for tea under three or four different settings, because green tea and herbal tea have different optimal temperatures. If you prefer a richer coffee experience, you can ask the machine for a doubleshot that adds more beans into the mix halfway through. 

I felt like a barista, and I have never been someone who aspired to a particularly heady cup of coffee. I doled out drinks to any neighbors who popped by; I obtained chocolate syrup and cocoa powder. I bought paper cups with lids. Time after time, the Miele cranked out perfect cups to happy neighbors in the midst of an eight-day ice storm that prevented coffee runs in the car.  

A bewildering interface

Can you guess which button dispenses coffee?
Credit: Amanda Blum

The front of the machine features an array of buttons, and with them, wordless pictures. One might expect these icons to refer to cup size (one is very small, one very tall and all sizes between). Instead, these are the buttons for eight common drinks. Presumably, you memorize what these icons represent. I did not. To access additional drinks like lattes, hot milk, or tea, you hit a settings button on the face, and then access a submenu called “additional drinks.” What is wild to me is that there isn’t a menu of all the possible drinks. If you just want a coffee, for instance, you’d have to start guessing which of those buttons actually gives you a cup of coffee; the machine immediately begins dispensing those drinks when you hit a button.

This $2,800 machine has a digital interface, but weirdly, not a touchscreen, so you scroll through the menus using up, down and “OK” buttons. Since my everyday drink, a latte, was buried in this “additional drinks” submenu, I found it annoying that I could do nothing to access this more quickly than three button presses and a long, imprecise scroll. 

For a home machine, setting drink volume was shockingly unintuitive—a frustration that led me to the instruction manual for the first time. All drinks are dispensed in tiny espresso-size versions. To change the volume, you go to the settings panel, select settings, then volume size, and then find your drink and, finally, hit “OK.” It will immediately dispense the drink, without further instruction, and you should intuit to hit the “OK” button when you hit the right amount. The machine will remember and dispense this new amount any time in the future someone asks for that drink. Hope all your mugs are the same size! It would make so much more sense to indicate drink size each time.

The most maddening aspect of the machine is the lack of an obvious cancel button. It turns out, if you hit the settings button it will act as a cancel button, but you’d only know that from reading a page deep in the manual. At least once a week I hit a button, immediately regretted it, and had no choice but to simply wait for it to complete the task I’d accidentally asked for.

An interesting app which is missing some elements

The dream of turning on the Miele and getting it to brew a cup while you’re still in bed should be achievable using the Miele app. Some of those functions are, and I was able to turn the machine on from the app, then Google Assistant, and finally I automated it through Google Home. The problem is that you can’t ask it to brew a cup from afar because when you turn the machine on, it immediately rinses the machine—so any cup waiting for your coffee is going to get filled with rinse water. More on that to come. 

What the app does let you do is set a favorite drink per profile. For instance, I could tell the machine my drink was a latte, and even what volume I wanted of coffee and milk. But I had to be at the machine, to add a cup after the rinsing had ended. Why should I have to use an app while standing in front of the machine? It’s for while I’m on the couch, so I don’t have to stand here and wait for my drink. 

That said, a fascinating app feature, and perhaps one of the most interesting uses of an app connected to a device, was the “virtual barista.” Miele has created an experience wherein you open the app, stand by the machine, and it will guide you on a whole coffee tasting experience to ascertain the absolutely perfect coffee for you, and then remember all of your ideal settings. I really enjoyed the thoughtfulness of the experience. 

An annoyingly clean machine

Anytime you do anything with the Miele, it will rinse itself. Turn it on, it rinses. Turn it off, it rinses. Each time, it fills up the tray at the bottom of the machine, and drains the water reservoir. Each time a loud beeping sound rings throughout the house. It served no purpose and no one could sleep through it so I muted every single sound the machine could make. Most days, I was one person making one drink a day, and half of that drink was milk-based. Yet I had to empty the tray daily, if not more than once a day ,which is a messy endeavor requiring exceptional balance by the time the tray is full. I also had to refill the water reservoir at least once a day. What would a coffee enthusiast or family do? 

The upside of this cleanliness was that the silicone tube that connected the machine to the milk container was also flushed, meaning you didn’t have to disconnect it and rinse it each time.

You could learn to love this machine, but the interface needs improvement

I was incredibly happy with the coffee produced by the Miele MilkPerfection 6360. The coffee itself was effortless; I didn’t have to hold a milk container and agitate it, or tamp coffee grounds. If I pressed the right series of buttons, each time: perfection.  Ultimately, I learned how to get to the drinks I wanted by working around the peculiarities of the machine, but at this price, less work should be involved. The lack of clarity with the interface meant that I avoided experimenting with other drinks. I was scared to press buttons on the machine or I’d have to suffer through another rinse or a tiny, tiny coffee I didn’t want.  The Miele comes with a substantial instruction manual, and it is, to date, the first one I’ve read cover to cover. I did this out of necessity, rather than choice, because the Miele is not hard to use, per se, but requires studying and memorization on your part.  

I’d love to see the next iteration of the MilkPerfection with a better interface, and a larger water reservoir and waste tray, but if you’re just looking to get into a well-established relationship with your coffee machine, the Miele is on par price-wise with other machines of this caliber, and I don’t have a single complaint about the drinks themselves.